The Sad Part Was Page 9

  “Fine. It’s your money. As long as you’re sure, then it’s none of my business. I apologise.” (Damned right it’s none of your business, Natee thought to himself.) The store clerk stuffed the shirt box into a shopping bag, took the money from Natee, and handed him the bag together with the change.

  Natee has proudly worn the red pajama shirt several times since then, and his dream personality hasn’t altered at all. On the contrary, the shirt has encouraged him to become a man of conviction in his waking life. As to what these convictions were supposed to be, Natee wasn’t quite sure. But it was safe to say that a night shirt so principled wouldn’t drop a button easily.

  For these reasons, Natee was certain that his three favorite pajama shirts were absolutely not to blame for the button-loss phenomenon. Therefore, further investigation was surely needed to get to the bottom of the enigma.

  Natee glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand. The minute hand was between numbers three and four; the hour hand was pointing at number seven. He stayed sitting in bed, both hands resting over the third button hole from the top. The transparent button that had used to cling there would now be lying inert, wedged into the wooden floor.

  On the wall to his left, the Chinese calendar – the kind where you rip off a page a day – showed number nineteen. The letters below the number read Saturday. He looked up from the red pajama shirt. For one long moment, he stared ahead like a person without a soul. When his spirit returned to his body, Natee lay back flat on the bed and let his head sink into the soft, plump pillow.

  It was Saturday morning. Why get wound up over buttons?

  Snow for Mother

  Beginning of November:

  Nuan harboured a belief that she had never shared with anyone, not even with Aim, her regular hairdresser with whom she was so close they were practically family. But more than twenty years ago, her only son, Pon, had stormed into her mosquito net, his eight-year-old fists full of grass he had scraped up from the roadside. “Mommy, I brought you snow,” he had announced to her in his little voice. From that day on, Nuan became convinced that if only her beloved son could come into contact with snow, real snow, he might be cured. She herself had seen them, those round white balls that resembled little taro dumplings, floating down from the atmosphere in colder climes, but only in pictures and on screen, never in person.

  “It’s such a strange disorder,” Aim said, apropos of nothing, while washing her hands under the tap at the shampoo station. Nuan didn’t pay much attention to her friend. It had been a topic of conversation between the two women for over a decade, and every time it came up, Aim felt the need to emphasise just how bizarre Pon’s mental abnormality was, Pon who was now over thirty years old, but still brought his mother snow each and every day.

  “Someone who’s never seen snow, a kid who doesn’t even know what snow is, how does he become fixated on it? It makes no sense.” These are the same old comments with which Aim has tried to resolve the issue countless times before. “You said so yourself that you never put the image of snow into his head. You’re not even familiar with snow yourself, are you?”

  Aim didn’t turn to look at Nuan as she posed the question. Her focus remained on the flow of water that was slipping through all ten of her fingers and washing the soapsuds down the drain. As for Nuan, she didn’t let a word out of her mouth. She sat in front of the mirror, head tilted down to read the daily newspaper that she was holding open. Her fingertips were smeared with ink from the surface of the paper, so she grabbed a tissue from the flame-orange plastic box on the white counter below the mirror. She then rested the newspaper on her lap and tried to wipe the black marks off her tawny skin, until the thin white layers of the tissue had absorbed at least some of the ink. But the smudges remained visible; the ink had clung too closely to be wiped cleanly away.

  “It’s quiet today,” Nuan said, before scrunching the tissue into a ball and tossing it into the waste basket. Aside from herself and Aim, no one else was in the salon.

  “Yesterday was the same. It is middle of the week, you know,” Aim shot back, as if she’d had the response prepared in her head. She turned off the tap and walked over to Nuan’s seat with a wet washcloth in her hand.

  “It’s almost Pon’s birthday again, isn’t it? The twenty-fifth of this month, right?” Aim folded the washcloth in half before gently placing it on the base of Nuan’s neck.

  The warmth from the fabric quickly permeated Nuan’s pores. She slowly nodded in lieu of words, then gradually allowed her eyelids to lower all the way down. The newspaper had been folded and placed in front of the mirror. Nuan tried to clear her mind in preparation for the massage her friend was about to pamper her with. Her shoulders happened to be tense.

  “I have a good memory,” Aim stated matter-of-factly as her clean fingers made contact with the reddish floral polyester that covered Nuan’s skin.

  The back of the salon chair reclined, and Nuan’s body leaned obligingly back with it.

  “Pon’s birthday present this year is going to be the most special yet,” Nuan suddenly confessed.

  “I finally saved up enough money for plane tickets. For his birthday this year, his present will be his first trip abroad. I’m going to take him to Alasaka.” Nuan kept her eyes closed all the while, carefully measuring every word that came out of her mouth, as though she were disclosing classified information to her friend.

  Aim jumped with excitement. “Really, Nuan?” She momentarily forgot her duties, and her fingers pulled back from the customer’s expectant shoulders. “Are you being serious?”

  “Saving that amount was no walk in the park. At first I was worried that I’d be ancient by the time I had it down - even more ancient than I am now, that is - that I might not even live to see the day. Pon ought to count himself lucky to have such a dogged mother as me.” Nuan opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. The blades of the fan spun lazily, its rhythm perfectly in sync with the languid cadence of the music drifting in from outside.

  “I like this song,” Nuan remarked softly.

  “Hang on a minute! You never mentioned a word about this to me. How much did you shell out?” Despite her interrogation, Aim had an absent-minded expression on her face. Her attention was elsewhere, trying to visualise the scenery of the faraway land. Her hands began to maneuver back toward Nuan’s collar bones. A-las-sa-ka. Alasaka. Alasaka. These four syllables meant nothing at all to her. She could repeat them without end, and she still wouldn’t be able to imagine what the place looked like. Alasaka. A-las-sa-ka. At least the name sounded like it would be cold.

  “Almost a hundred thousand for two, there and back. And then there’s living costs for while we’re there, and other expenses. That’s why I said it was no walk in the park.” Nuan gently closed her eyes again as Aim began to knead the pressure points on her shoulders.

  “Wow,” Aim exclaimed, though more out of politeness than amazement. Her mind was still occupied with the topography of the distant continent. “What the heck made you decide on this Alasaka place?”

  “I’ve been planning this for a long time. I researched it myself and asked various people here and there. I was determined to take Pon to a place where there’d definitely be snow, and they say this Alasaka is seriously cold. It’s so cold that there’s always tons of snow, that’s what everybody says. The books say it, too. I asked Ms. Jiu – you know Ms. Jiu the teacher, right? She confirmed that it was cold there, cold and very snowy. So I made up my mind that Alasaka was the place to take Pon. This way he’ll see snow as soon as we get there, because it’s all over the place, you know? You run into it just like that, so it’ll be easy for him to get to see snow. But you have to fly more than a day to get there. And we have to stop somewhere else first, too. I’m a little concerned, it’s true – I don’t know if Pon will be able to sit still for so long, cooped up in that tiny plane all the way up in the sky. But I asked Dr. Sit, and h
e said it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “And how are you going to understand what any­body’s tongue is saying? Or the other way around?” Aim couldn’t think of a single instance during the course of their friendship when she’d heard Nuan whip up another country’s – any other country’s – language. She couldn’t be 100% sure whether this was due to a lapse in her memory or because her friend had never done it in the first place, hence there was nothing for her to remember. But she suspected that the latter was more likely.

  “I won’t, probably, or at least not very much. I’ve been practicing, asking people to teach me, listening to TV programmes, sounding out the words on the page to myself. But I just ad-lib it, you know, just kind of take a stab at it. When it’s for real, I probably won’t have the nerve to open my mouth. Luckily, when Ms. Jiu saw that I was seriously planning to go, she went out of her way to find out if any of her students have family living in Alasaka. As it turned out, she eventually found one, a friend of an uncle of the sister-in-law of one of her former students. His name’s Sompob. He works in a town called Fairbanks, so she suggested that I go there, as she’d already asked her student to send word to Sompob, and ask him to look after me and Pon. Ms. Jiu’s network stretches so far! That’s the benefit of having so many nice pupils. I really feel indebted to her.” Nuan’s jaw was aching from this lengthy elaboration. Her eyes felt irritated, so she went to rub them with her right hand. Aim quickly thrust out her own hand to intercept her friend.

  “Pummel them like that and you’re going to go blind before you get to see what it’s like abroad. Huh!” Aim grabbed the warm washcloth from the base of Nuan’s neck and used one corner of it to pat around her friend’s itching eyes. “Ms. Jiu’s fond of Pon. You shouldn’t think of it as being indebted or anything like that. People who’ve known each other for decades, you do whatever you can to help, right?”

  Below the nose on the face that was half covered with the white cloth, the lips were curling into a smile.

  “It must be because of my good karma that I know quite a few nice people.”

  Aim pretended not to hear. She draped the towel back over the base of Nuan’s neck and placed her palms once again on the muscles that were waiting to be kneaded.

  “If your husband were still here, what would he say about his wife being so resourceful as to save a pile of cash, enough to take his son on an airplane to Alasaka?” Aim snickered, her eyes watching for a reaction on her friend’s upturned face.

  If my husband were still here, I probably wouldn’t get to go anywhere. And maybe Pon wouldn’t get to go anywhere either. It’s precisely because my husband isn’t here that I pushed all the way to this point, Nuan thought to herself, without allowing any of these sentences to spill out onto her face.

  When the faint strains of the song ended, Nuan glanced up at the ceiling fan again and began to move her lips.

  “I’m excited. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what Pon’s going to do when he gets to see, to touch, to scoop up real snow and hold it in his hands. But maybe some good will come of it. Maybe something will change.”

  “You think snow’s going to help cure Pon.” Putting her hands in the prayer position, Aim chopped lightly along her friend’s shoulders.

  The answer was yes. That was what Nuan was thinking and hoping would come of their travelling all the way to Alaska. She wanted to see Pon jump up and down on the snow and scream and shout with joy: “Mother! Mother, look! This is snow. This, this is what I’ve been trying to bring you ever since I was a child. This is what I’ve been searching for for more than twenty years. I’ve finally found it, Mother, I’ve found snow. Here it is. So much of it everywhere you look, you can sweep it up all you want and it’d never run out. I know everything I brought you in the past was all junk. I know it wasn’t snow. Because today I can feel the coldness of real snow with my own hands. From here on, I won’t have to keep on struggling to find it for you. This is enough. I can finally start living a normal life, like everyone else.”

  That scene would bring Nuan the greatest possible happiness, but she didn’t dare set her hopes as high as her heart wanted her to, because she feared that if it didn’t come true, the sadness would only multiply.

  So Nuan told Aim: “I don’t know. If that happens, it would be nice.”

  —

  End of December:

  “That cold?” Aim raised her voice to contend with the flow of water colliding with her friend’s hair. The gooey honey-coloured shampoo in her hand was ready to be smeared and lathered on the scalp held over the ceramic bowl.

  “I was numb all over, if you can believe it. I bundled myself up like sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves, but the cold still managed to seep in. Even gloves didn’t do the trick. My fingers were so frozen I couldn’t grip anything. My ears, my cheeks, my nose were all bright red as if they’d been roasted over a fire, but this was cold fire, and the only relief was to stand there with your teeth clenched,” Nuan recounted happily. She kept her eyes shut tight to prevent water from splashing into them.

  Her body was stretched out straight on the plastic-upholstered bed, every muscle relaxed.

  “People there are nice. They’re friendly. A lot of families fish for a living. They go out fishing even though it’s so cold. Hard to believe they can bear it. I met a nice American girl, probably not even twenty years old. Her name’s Abby. Sompob introduced us. He told me she was raised in an orphanage as a baby. When she was a bit bigger, a couple from some desert state asked to adopt her. The weather was the polar opposite to Alasaka. The desert’s hot, you know? She lived there for a while, and then it turned out the husband was a psycho. He liked to beat women or something like that. Abby put up with it until she was grown up, but eventually she couldn’t take it any longer. She probably got mistreated too often, so she packed her bags and took off. She just upped and walked out of the house one day. And then she hitchhiked her way around the country until she decided to settle down and find a proper job there in Fairbanks. And do you know what she does? Her job is to move fish in and out of freezers. Imagine it – a young girl, not very big, carrying blocks of ice up by the North Pole. The whole city’s like a freezer already, you know? And on top of that she works with cold, clunky stuff. She’s really tough. And she’s sweet. She’d chat with me about this and that. I just nodded along.” Nuan’s giggles interrupted her speech. “I had to wait for Sompob to relay the translation. It was a lot of back and forth before we could understand each other. But it was fun. I really like that kid. Don’t know what she was thinking running away to a freezing place to do freezing work. But I’ll tell you something, she seemed happy.”

  Aim didn’t pay much attention to the story about the amazing American girl named Abby. Her frustration was too great. How much longer was Nuan going to go on and on about this nonsense? Although she was delighted to have her friend back in this hemisphere, what about the crucial purpose of her intercontinental travel? Its outcome was the subject Aim was eagerly awaiting, the subject Nuan showed no sign of approaching.

  Nuan’s hair had become much coarser, probably due to the dryness of the air in A-las-sa-ka. “What about the food? How was it? Could Pon eat anything?” Aim tried to steer the conversation toward her own target.

  “How should I put it?” Nuan took a moment to reflect on her own question. “Their food’s just not really to our taste. It’s so rich, so bland, and not very appetizing. Granted, it does help make the cold easier to tolerate. Once you think of it that way, you can eat anything. Some days it was even quite tasty. Especially hot tea – that became my favourite thing. You know yourself, when have I ever liked tea? But the weather was so brutal that to get a break from the cold and sit in a little café sipping a cup or two of hot tea just cheers you right up. And now I’ve brought my tea addiction back with me.” Nuan let out a laugh that interfered with Aim’s conditioner application. “But tea’s
not exactly food, is it?”

  Why isn’t she talking about the snow?

  Nuan herself was fully aware of what her friend was waiting for.

  On the inner surface of her eyelids, the images from her freshly minted memory were projected.

  Pon was stamping over the dazzling white ground. His eyes glittered and gleamed as though beholding some great wonder. After he snapped out of the reverie, he bent down to gather up snow until each palm cradled a handful. Then he approached his mother, who was keeping a close eye on her dear son’s every move.

  “Mother, I brought you snow.” The thirty-one-year-old man’s boast was delivered in a voice oh-so-familiar to his mother’s ears.

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” Nuan said as she reached out to accept the mounds of icy crystals. A cloud sprang from her mouth after each word.

  It was the same phrase with which she had thanked her son every day since that first time over twenty years ago, the same phrase she would likely have to go on repeating tomorrow and the next day and the next.

  How many mothers out there…

  …get to say thank you to their child as often as I do?

  Marut by the Sea

  Before it’s too late, may I tell you, dear readers, that my name is not Marut? And I’m not sitting by the sea at all. If you want me to confess, I must admit that I don’t know my own name or what kind of landscape surrounds me. I might be standing in front of a train station. I might be walking through an untamed jungle. I might be sleeping in a spaceship that’s traveling to a faraway galaxy. The possibilities in that regard are limitless. I’m sorry – I might not even be a person. You might be reading the confession of a bogie. Who knows?

  There’s this guy. He likes to think that he knows it all. He bosses people around, dreaming up their destinies as though he were God. To make matters worse, deep down in his unconscious he secretly believes that he’s so smart, that he’s a top-notch philosopher in a class of his own, that he’s attained all the Noble Truths of Buddhism, that his enlightened mind perceives all nature’s intricate cycles, that he gives life and breath to cows and buffaloes that he moulds out of clay, that he can shape stories out of nothingness. Well, watch out. He’s a major con artist. Don’t waste your precious time with his nonsense. Granted, he might say or do things to amaze you. He might write words that tug on your heart strings. You might find his unusual perspective charming. He might lead you to believe that he has something important to say. But believe me, every single thing that you think you learn from him in fact comes from you yourself. As the Thai expression says, grandma’s treats bought with grandma’s money. That’s all it is. People like him are the most dangerous of all. He dangles your own humanity in front of you for you to buy. The more you fall for it, the more influence he has over your brain cells. Eventually, one day, without your knowing it, every sentence that passes through your head will have him as its puppet master, operating behind the scenes.